Hi all, I am getting overwhelmed by mail.. As a club comitee member, a newsletter editor,parent of kids etc. I am getting sh**loads of mails I have problems to process and.. to find things! There are a lot of "Me to!" mails, subjects get "re-used" for other discussions etc. When I'm at "yeah, there was a form someone sent me, I have to fill it and hand it to the school tomorrow", I just vaguely remember who send it, what the subject was etc .. and it is frustrating. Sometimes I wish I have a "pinboard" for "spheres" (school, club, family..) where I can pin mails and give them short description "School camp health check form, has to be handed in 15/5/13") and a link to the original mail. Does something like this exist? Or.. how to you deal with "information overflow"? Regards Peter
Hello Petros, On Fri, 03 May 2013 16:00:09 +1000, Petros <Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au> wrote: [snip]
Sometimes I wish I have a "pinboard" for "spheres" (school, club, family..) where I can pin mails and give them short description "School camp health check form, has to be handed in 15/5/13") and a link to the original mail.
Does something like this exist?
Or.. how to you deal with "information overflow"?
It probably depends on which application you are using for your email. I use Opera (the web browser), and it provides an ability to set up "labels" which allows you to filter your mail so they can be read/managed from separate bins. Cheers, -- Regards, Terry Duell
On 05/03/2013 04:00 PM, Petros wrote:
Hi all,
I am getting overwhelmed by mail.. As a club comitee member, a newsletter editor,parent of kids etc. I am getting sh**loads of mails I have problems to process and..
You can use procmail to pre sort them into different folders so you can have them automatically grouped.
On 3/05/13 4:12 PM, Piers Rowan wrote:
On 05/03/2013 04:00 PM, Petros wrote:
Hi all,
I am getting overwhelmed by mail.. As a club comitee member, a newsletter editor,parent of kids etc. I am getting sh**loads of mails I have problems to process and..
You can use procmail to pre sort them into different folders so you can have them automatically grouped. I use gmail's server side filtering, then access my mail using IMAP with Thunderbird. The gmail labels appear as folders in Thunderbird.
-- 73 de Tony VK3JED http://vkradio.com
Hi Petros,
Or.. how to you deal with "information overflow"?
Read every email once. Either act on it or delete it. Start doing the same with other social media. Act or ignore. Don't store thinking "Hmm.. this is interesting, I'll get back to that", except in the case when the storage is the action (e.g., you're writing a book or paper on the subject). You can't do this all the time obviously, but you consciously think about it each time you read email, you'll be surprised how fast you can trim the inbox. All the best, -- Lev Lafayette, mobile: 61 432 255 208 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt
Petros <Petros.Listig@fdrive.com.au> wrote:
Sometimes I wish I have a "pinboard" for "spheres" (school, club, family..) where I can pin mails and give them short description "School camp health check form, has to be handed in 15/5/13") and a link to the original mail.
Does something like this exist?
There is interesting work taking place in the Linux community on the Notmuch mail system: http://www.notmuchmail.org/ The underlying concept is that each message can be assigned multiple labels, manually or automatically via scripts. You can search for messages by various criteria, including label, headers and body text. No mail is ever deleted. There are user interfaces for Emacs, Vi and probably other environments by now. The way I have always handled this is to use Procmail to filter incoming mail as it arrives and to place it in various mail folders. There are lots of tutorials on the Web explaining how to use Procmail effectively. A newer (and arguably better) tool in this category is Maildrop, but there is less community support and documentation for it. Mutt is rather good at, for example, displaying only messages that match a search (this is the limit command). Tagging works in the same manner, and you can copy or save all tagged messages, for example. Internet mail has been around for decades, which is why there are very well developed tools for dealing with large amounts of it efficiently.
Hi all,
I am getting overwhelmed by mail.. As a club comitee member, a newsletter editor,parent of kids etc. I am getting sh**loads of mails I have problems to process and..
to find things!
Probably not appropriate for a Linux list, but I use Exchange/outlook for my work email, and the search features are awesome. I can find pretty much anything in my 4GB mailbox in seconds. Unfortunately I don't know of a way to assign arbitrary tags to an email, although you can assign one or more categories and search on those too. Alternatively you can edit the received email and add tags to the subject or something, as long as you can do it in such a way that it's obvious you added them. Outlook threading is pretty poor as is though, and this might muck it up more. I automatically sort the various mailing lists into their appropriate folder (and delete mostly after I've read it - it's all archived online anyway) but everything else goes into the inbox and I just search when I need something. I used to sort my inbox into folders, but the idea that an email belongs in one and only one folder is flawed. I do flag email I need to come back to though. But at the end of the day, short of outright deleting email you know you won't ever have time to do anything with, no amount of clever sorting and searching is going to help you work through the important emails in any way that is significantly faster. Get yourself a PA :) James
On 03/05/2013, at 9:07 PM, James Harper <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
Hi all,
I am getting overwhelmed by mail.. As a club comitee member, a newsletter editor,parent of kids etc. I am getting sh**loads of mails I have problems to process and..
to find things!
Probably not appropriate for a Linux list, but I use Exchange/outlook for my work email, and the search features are awesome. I can find pretty much anything in my 4GB mailbox in seconds.
Unfortunately I don't know of a way to assign arbitrary tags to an email, although you can assign one or more categories and search on those too. Alternatively you can edit the received email and add tags to the subject or something, as long as you can do it in such a way that it's obvious you added them. Outlook threading is pretty poor as is though, and this might muck it up more.
I automatically sort the various mailing lists into their appropriate folder (and delete mostly after I've read it - it's all archived online anyway) but everything else goes into the inbox and I just search when I need something. I used to sort my inbox into folders, but the idea that an email belongs in one and only one folder is flawed. I do flag email I need to come back to though.
But at the end of the day, short of outright deleting email you know you won't ever have time to do anything with, no amount of clever sorting and searching is going to help you work through the important emails in any way that is significantly faster. Get yourself a PA :)
James
_______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main@luv.asn.au http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
At work we're Google Apps shop so I tend to use the web interface, however to enhance the experience and increase productivity I use a browser add-on called Activeinbox. It allows you to process your mail using the GTD philosophy meaning you only ever have deal with issues that actually need action etc. That plus the use of labels and google's search features makes managing mail a chore less task.
On 3/05/13 9:07 PM, James Harper wrote:
Hi all,
I am getting overwhelmed by mail.. As a club comitee member, a newsletter editor,parent of kids etc. I am getting sh**loads of mails I have problems to process and..
to find things!
Probably not appropriate for a Linux list, but I use Exchange/outlook for my work email, and the search features are awesome. I can find pretty much anything in my 4GB mailbox in seconds. I get the same results on gmail. :)
Unfortunately I don't know of a way to assign arbitrary tags to an email, although you can assign one or more categories and search on those too. Alternatively you can edit the received email and add tags to the subject or something, as long as you can do it in such a way that it's obvious you added them. Outlook threading is pretty poor as is though, and this might muck it up more. I can assign labels, most of which I do automatically with filters. :)
I automatically sort the various mailing lists into their appropriate folder (and delete mostly after I've read it - it's all archived online anyway) but everything else goes into the inbox and I just search when I need something. I used to sort my inbox into folders, but the idea that an email belongs in one and only one folder is flawed. I do flag email I need to come back to though. I let the mail build up on the server, just set threads to read if they're not of interest.
But at the end of the day, short of outright deleting email you know you won't ever have time to do anything with, no amount of clever sorting and searching is going to help you work through the important emails in any way that is significantly faster. Get yourself a PA :) :D
-- 73 de Tony VK3JED http://vkradio.com
participants (8)
-
Colin Fee -
James Harper -
Jason White -
Lev Lafayette -
Petros -
Piers Rowan -
Terry Duell -
Tony Langdon